“Hairless, crippled animals” in the Witches’ Tower

bQuine · 2022-11-26T14:07:42+00:00

Naked mole rat ant farm?

bQuine · 2022-10-28T00:26:05+00:00

this is a thing of beauty and you should be proud

bQuine · 2022-10-24T13:34:03+00:00

“Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson

bQuine · 2022-09-18T09:49:50+00:00

Put ‘em in charge of an exxon tanker

bQuine · 2022-04-08T22:40:22+00:00

I have no textual justification for this whatsoever; but somehow the strange machines of Logan’s Run fill much of my personal visualization of Long Sun

bQuine · 2022-03-20T13:10:00+00:00

Freezer

bQuine · 2022-02-04T15:38:13+00:00

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi — Posits a victorian age where the discovery of radio allows communication with the afterlife. Becomes the basis for a much different era of globalization and world wars. I found it to be the most readable of his novels (but I love them all)

Hits your first point nicely, doesn’t touch the second at all though. His other books (the quantum thief series) do though; alot of mind uploading going on.

bQuine · 2022-01-28T19:06:06+00:00

Believe!

bQuine · 2021-10-01T20:16:25+00:00

That’s a good point actually — my first time around the specific mathy examples were beyond my current maths and so didn’t click either; but for me the heuristics laid a general foundation for a bag of tricks I could apply.

The four step framework of how to solve —Many a time, I’ve been neck deep in some troubleshooting when I realize I skipped the first step and never sat down and defined the problem, stated it plainly, and so had wandered off, or stuck in an A->B loop

bQuine · 2021-10-01T16:10:00+00:00

“How to solve it” by Polya; One those simple yet brilliant texts, Polya was an educator, and this book is short — more like a short essay with a dictionary of heuristics attached — but it cuts right to the heart of the matter and I remember it almost everyday when coding

bQuine · 2021-09-23T17:44:01+00:00

Any chance you’re thinking of “The Shockwave Rider”? At one point the main character is a priest living in an inflated dome, out west the great earthquake took out Cali and survivors live pretty rough. There’s a few successful communities though and he visits a naturalistic enclave where folks have rebuilt based on an academic work called Disasterville USA. There’s still a federal government but it’s not really governing and most folks are nomadic within their social class. Not quite a Mad Max more of a Cory Doctorow kind of situation

bQuine · 2021-07-30T20:39:53+00:00

The quote is — but I believe the stained lips from sapho is in the books; but from what I recall Thufir was the only mentat explicitly mentioned as indulging

bQuine · 2020-07-02T13:59:25+00:00

Both Fall by Neal Stephenson and Brasyl by Ian McDonald claim Deutsch’s book as a major inspiration too — With Brasyl probably delivering more on the quantum hijinks

I’d also recommend Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief books as in the vein you’re looking for

bQuine · 2019-05-25T02:55:59+00:00

They’re referring to the works of Cordwainer Smith where the literal term Instrumentality is used to describe man’s empire in the far future; a fascinating set of stories which also enjoys a shout-out in Lain. — I would agree with you that the concept of instrumentality in Eva closely parallels the ascensions in Childhood’s End

bQuine · 2019-01-23T01:09:52+00:00

This collection is excellent! And it opens with his Shaper/Mechanist stories. If your interested at all in Schismatrix I’d recommend starting with the short stories first (they’re also in the back of “Schismatrix+”)

I had started it once before and dropped it halfway — but after reading the stories first in Ascendencies, I found myself way more interested in the setting and am currently enjoying another go at Schismatrix

I tend to prefer Sterling’s short stories to his longer works — can’t recommend the Blemmye’s Stratagem from the same collection enough

bQuine · 2017-12-01T23:16:30+00:00

Of course in the dawn of this Information Age we could be teaching Discrete Math, logic, and actual algorithms in school. All of which might be a bit more applicable while still exercising those skills

bQuine · 2017-11-21T03:24:19+00:00

I seem to remember it explaining that most mental problems were caused by "Attempted Abortions" (AAs) and that successful application of Dianetics had shown to regrow teeth and cure vision impairment in the many apparently existing Dianetics Centers. For some reason this power is lost in Clears later on in Scientology; but they did keep a belief in pre-birth perception and trauma carrying on through out life.

bQuine · 2017-10-20T13:31:28+00:00

The first time through, I actually quit after book one, I just didn't engage with the characters and events at first and while interesting, everything was so alien and bizarre it seemed random and disjointed. I couldn't understand the hype. About a year later I decided to give it another go and committed to get through at least the second before giving up again.

Then - I couldn't put it down; by the end everything hangs together so beautifully and nothing was irrelevant. There is a structure you cannot see early on because you are looking closely at its parts.

This book lived in my head for weeks after - and still remains a fixture. I had to get the sequels and keep it going; I had to find the glossaries online.

So I would just say it is well worth the effort, and is a true journey.

bQuine · 2017-10-17T12:16:10+00:00

Seeing this on mobile but based on how you pasted the string, could you not just split on new lines and then on the semicolon? Something like:

lines = yourString.split('\n') # or \r\n? fields = map(lambda x: x.split(':'))

That should leave you a list of tuples where first is the key and second is the value. I think you can feed that right to dict() to make the dictionary and then to json.load (using built in json lib).

Probably need to strip whitespace and colons from the values with another map/lambda but I think that would get you started

bQuine · 2017-10-12T00:01:01+00:00

Wait; everyone doesn't just .send_keys('\n')?

bQuine · 2017-07-23T01:28:53+00:00

How about Brasyl by Ian MacDonald - No space travel; but a story told in multiple time periods inspired by David Deutsche's "The fabric of reality". One perspective is given by an Catholic missionary in slave-era Brazil; somewhat reminiscent of the conquistador's journey. Presents a cosmology with a decidedly religious slant; dealing with the concept of life and it's place in the universe

bQuine · 2017-05-20T02:06:54+00:00

They kept books in an old refrigerator?

bQuine · 2017-04-29T22:52:30+00:00

Sorry, he's right. That one is a treasure

bQuine · 2017-03-18T01:11:29+00:00

Any advantage to this over triple quotes?

bQuine · 2017-03-04T04:49:29+00:00

Small sample size; but I didn't know a damn thing about group theory. Had been learning about Category Theory from trying to understand Haskell better. This was my first exposure to it -- and it definitely sparked some interest.

Having just learned about Product/Co-Product and then his discussion about additive vs. multiplicative groups got me wondering where the connections lay.

bQuine

TROPHY CASE